Currently, there are available disc drives compatible with information signal recording media such as optical discs including a CD (Compact Disc), DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) and the like, magneto-optical disc called “MO” and magneto-optical disc called “MD (Mini Disc)”, and which can use each disc of such a type as it is or as housed in a cartridge called “disc cartridge”.
The disc drives using an optical disc as a recording medium include a type in which a disc is set directly on a turn-table exposed to outside with a lid or door provided on a housing being opened, a type in which a disc is mounted on a disc tray that is horizontally introduced into or ejected from a housing and the disc tray is carried into the housing and automatically set on a turn-table provided inside the housing, and a type in which a disc is set directly on a turn-table provided on a disc tray. In all of these types of disc drives, it is necessary to open and close the lid or door, introduce and eject the disc tray and set the disc on the turn-table.
Besides the above disc drives, there is available a type using a slot-in type loading mechanism by which a disc just inserted through a disc slot provided at the front side of a housing can automatically be set on a turn-table. This type of disc drive includes a pair of guide rollers to catch a disc inserted through the disc slot and carry the disc into the housing. More specifically, the disc inserted through the disc slot is taken into the housing by the pair of guide rollers rotated in directions opposite to each other (which is called “disc loading”). When an eject operation is made by the user, the rollers in pair are rotated in directions opposite to those for the disc loading to carry the disc to outside the housing (which is called “disc ejection”).
Note here that the mobile device, for example, a portable personal computer in which a disc drive is to be installed, is required to be more compact and lightweight and slimmer and hence the disc drive to be installed in such as mobile device is also required to be correspondingly more compact and lightweight and slimmer. Also, it should be noted that a disc drive using the slot-in type loading mechanism easier to use is in higher demand in lieu of the disc drive of the tray type currently used in many portable personal computers.
To load a disc, the disc drive using the slot-in type loading mechanism needs a pair of guide rollers for catching and carrying a disc as mentioned above. However, the guide rollers are longer in the direction of the width of the entire disc drive because their length is larger than the diameter of a disc to carry because their structure. Also, since the pair of guide rollers catches the disc between them, their thickness is considerably large, which makes it difficult to design the conventional slot-in type disc drive more compact and slimmer.
The slim disc drive to be installed in a small mobile device such as a notebook computer having such a size as to be portable is normalized to have a thickness of 12.7 mm, and slimed to a thickness of 9.5 mm which is also the thickness of the hard disc drive (HDD). Therefore, adoption of a slot-in type loading mechanism including a pair of guide rollers in a disc drive slimmed to such a thickness is extremely difficult because of its structure.
To meet the requirements for a more compact and slimmer structure, there have been proposed disc drives each adopting the slot-in type loading mechanism, in which a plurality of pivoting arms is disposed between a disc inserted through a disc slot and a base having installed thereon a turn-table on which the disc is to be set, the pivoting arms are rotated in a plane parallel to the inserted disc to carry the disc from the disc slot into a housing and eject the disc from the disc slot to outside the housing. A typical one of these types of disc drives is disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2002-117604.
In the disc drive proposed in the above patent document to overcome the drawbacks of the disc drive adopting the slot-in loading, there is provided a mechanism to forcibly eject an optical disc having a smaller diameter other than 12 cm (which is the diameter of the widely used standard-size optical disc), such as a CD of 8 cm in diameter, a recording-only DVD used in a camcorder or the like, introduced through a disc slot because the disc drive itself is compatible with only the standard-size optical disc. Therefore, this type of disc drive cannot make any slot-in loading of such discs different in outside diameter from each other.
On this account, there has been demanded a disc drive adopting the slot-in loading, capable of selective loading of discs different in outside diameter from each other, and designed for a slimmer structure.